Atari: Game Over Page #2

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I knew the economics of the

coin operated game business.

They made a lot of money.

Nolan designed

these incredibly elegant

circuits.

Put together in a way that's

so clever that modern engineers

have a hard time, you

know, understanding

and repairing these things.

My partner and I,

Ted Dabney, started

working on a ping-pong game.

By the end of '72,

we did $3.5 million dollars.

And then we did $19 million.

Then we did $35 million.

It was a hockey stick.

This electronic medium,

which was just beginning,

had some traction with people.

And once you played some of the

more sophisticated arcade games

of the day, and understood

that maybe there

was a chance you could

duplicate that in a home game,

your eyes got big.

Home video games

have been a success

from the moment a

company called Atari

launched this basic game, Pong.

Which has been imitated by at

least 40 other manufacturers.

They're selling like crazy.

300,000 last year.

This year, three million.

Next year, six,

maybe 10 million.

We felt, well, maybe

this is a time to sell

to a company with deep pockets.

I was in my office

at Warner in 1976.

The phone rang, and it was

a guy named Gordy Crawford,

and he asked the question

I've never forgotten.

Would you guys be interested in

acquiring a technology based,

fast growing

And I said yes.

I didn't know what I said

yes to, but I said yes.

And that led to my

introduction to Atari.

Atari, where

the future comes from.

What excited

me about Atari wasn't Pong,

it was the chipset that

led to the Atari 2600.

Pong was sort of OK, you banged

up and back, and up and back.

But this meant you could

constantly change the games.

And that was a

very exciting idea.

We introduced the 2600

in 1977

with nine cartridges.

The home video game was a

very close approximation

of the coin-op experience.

It changed

the mindset of the world.

Turning the television

from a passive medium into

an active medium, that

was what we knew we were doing.

And that was super exciting to

be the pioneers in that field.

It just blew people away.

Nobody knew any this stuff.

They made it up as they went.

And they were good at it.

And it started everything.

It was playing

those games that taught people

the potential of a computer.

Atari,

at some level,

brought the computer revolution.

They

started experimentally

hiring smart kids, with this

idea that maybe they can

come up with other stuff to do.

And they inadvertently

were trying to create

the job of game designer.

Microprocessor real

time control programming

is just where it's at.

So, there's two kinds of

things you typically do

with that in the early 1980s.

You can do missile

guidance systems...

or like we say, kill

people for 12 cents a head.

Or you could make

video games, which

I thought was a much

better application

for the whole thing.

What went on at

Atari from the very beginning

was, basically, that

the engineers are

going to drive this company.

Because they weren't

just engineers.

They were creative guys.

They're like musicians,

or movie directors.

They're artists.

Through

luck, or providence, or both,

they ended up with this

department of game designers

that became this

dream team at Atari.

These guys who made all of

these classics... Tempest,

and Asteroids, and Centipede,

and Gauntlet, and, you know,

think of a game.

The

culture was these guys

do what they want to do.

One day, I was standing in

the men's room, at a urinal,

and I looked down, and I saw a

pair of bare feet next to me.

And I look, and here is a

guy wearing a pair of shorts,

and nothing else.

And I said something.

And they said, oh

yeah, that's so and so.

He's a great engineer.

He doesn't like to wear clothes.

The coin-op engineers at

Atari, they were great.

And on the consumer

side, Howard was

one of the best programmers.

He was one of the best

of those engineers.

At the heart

of the creative process

is the programmer.

I try to create, basically, a

sensory experience that evokes

a certain feeling in the user.

I mean, I tend to

program from a concept.

I mean, it was... I

was made for this.

I mean, was is what

I was made to do.

January 11, 1981, I showed

up for my first day of work

as a game programmer at Atari.

So, do you remember the

first day you showed up here?

Absolutely.

My first office mates were

Tod Frye and Rob Zdybel.

And I had an

understanding that there

was a lot of dope

that was smoked

at Atari, when we were there.

And so on my first day at work,

I brought a joint, because I

didn't want to be, you know...

Yeah.

I wanted to be a courteous

guest, and so I showed up...

Which by the way,

this is a good lesson

for our younger viewers.

If people are doing drugs,

bring your own, so you fit in.

Tod walks

in, shuts the door, and says,

I'm going to get high

in here, so if you

don't want to be around

this, you'd better leave.

No, actually, here, I said.

I brought a joint.

And he sort of looked

at me and he went pbtt.

I'm going to smoke real stuff.

OK?

That was my introduction.

That was my first day at work.

We wanted

people who worked hard, and yet

had fun at doing it.

How do we mix up, so that

we don't know the difference

between our work and our play?

The company's motto was,

we take fun seriously.

But we used to say, we

take fun intravenously.

And they didn't

like that very much.

No, I don't know why.

The party atmosphere

was actually

calculated plan to incentivize.

I would set quotas.

If the quotas were met,

I'd throw a kegger.

They

would just roll out in the car,

go to a liquor store,

and they gave someone

a company credit

card, and they came

back with a bunch of booze.

And we consumed it.

Over there is where

the hot tub was.

Inside, on the first floor,

there's some great stuff

that went on in that room.

Over here, here's the

hill that you know,

one day I was wearing

a dashiki shirt, which

I was very into back then.

And I would do

somersaults down the hill.

I might have had some cocktails

that afternoon, at that point.

Did you know that you were

entering this crazy party

atmosphere, that you'd be?

No.

Even though I was told I

was, I had no expectation

that it could really exist.

The

best recruiting tool

we could have for an

engineer, was to bring

him over to one of our parties.

Hey, What's happening, people?

Hey, how's it going?

What's happening?

And they

thought, hey, I'm a nerd.

There are girls here.

They're talking to me.

It's good.

That was the culture.

These guys are the

lifeblood of the business,

and they do what

they want to do.

And that's fine.

In some ways,

things happened to

me over the course

of three and a half

years here, that made

the next 25 years really tough.

Because it

established a standard

of what professional life,

and life in general, could be.

And I never let

go of the thought

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